On one level, that sounded scary, but in fact she liked the feeling. She couldn't deny that it gave her a sense of strength and self-sufficiency. It was like the feeling she used to savor on stormy days when she was a little girl: putting on her big yellow raincoat and rain hat, borrowing Mom's umbrella, and going out to sit in the pouring rain. That feeling of solitude and tidy self-containment. Everything sopping and wild around you, but you were dry and safe in your glistening yellow armor. Everything you really needed, right there.
She dialed Edgar's home number, and he picked up after two rings. She was glad to hear his voice.
'It's me'.
'Hey, Cree. How'd it go?'
'The talk? Really well. The other presenters were great, too.'
' But-?'
She'd said, what, a dozen words to him, and he already could tell she was off balance. Suddenly Cree missed him painfully, missed his lanky body and wry grin and the way it felt to be around a man who knew her so well. She wished she could tell him that, but it was best to keep away from the complex of feelings there. Since last spring, when she'd begun an unexpected and still largely undeveloped romance with Paul Fitzpatrick in New Orleans, Ed had pulled away considerably. It was his way of giving her room to explore it without pressure from him. But though she had accepted the necessity of distance, she hated it, and in the last few months she'd learned just how deep her ambivalences ran. Maybe it wasn't just Ed who felt more than friendship. If Ed were here tonight, they'd go out and explore Albuquerque and have a good time. They'd drink and dance-he was a knockout dancer-and confide and tell bad-taste jokes as they walked the night streets together. The thought confused her and she put it away.
'A case dropped into my lap,' she explained. 'No, it was thrown there very deliberately. By Mason Ambrose.'
'Ambrose! That old bastard. No kidding.'
'Yeah, and it's a doozy. There's a boy with… well, with something wrong with him. Mason calls it 'a ghost in a bottle' for us to study.'
Ed paused, and she could imagine his long face frowning. 'Like what-the kid's possessed?'
'Something like that, yeah. So I agreed to go look into it, starting tomorrow. I was thinking you and Joyce should get down here.'
'Jesus, Cree-'
'I know.'
'Do you really?' The condescension, she knew, was just the sound of Ed's protective reflexes kicking in. 'Hey, Cree, let me spell something out for you. You're the most vulnerable person I've ever known. You almost died in New Orleans last spring. You're like a psychic petri dish, okay? An entity that can move right in on a normal person's nervous system is going to find you a pretty tempting little-'
'Not necessarily.'
'Oh, come on! Even a nice ghost puts your sanity at risk. You get 'possessed' by our goddamned clients!'
Of course, he was right. But, as always, she felt an unreasoning flash of resentment at him for pointing it out.
'This isn't The Exorcist, Ed,' she said witheringly.
'How do you know? You haven't been there yet. You have no idea what you're dealing with.'
Cree would have retorted sharply, but a shiver took her, as if her body recognized the danger her mind refused to accept. She opened her mouth and shut it again and listened to the hiss of the telephone line for several moments.
'Cree,' Ed said into the silence. His voice had changed, and now he just sounded concerned. Dear Ed: He'd never shown much stomach for fighting with her. 'Listen to me. Let me say one thing. Take a step back, okay? Third person. I'm just a guy in Seattle whose… friend, Cree, does risky things. Okay. But ever since he's known her, she's been very absorbed in her husband's death, right? Her husband, who appeared to her exactly once for about thirty seconds ten years ago, practically lives in her. I mean, possession, obsession, where's the line?'
Cree shut her eyes, not wanting to hear this.
He went on, still more quietly: 'In any case, we know you're vulnerable. You're temperamentally predisposed to this kind of thing. Okay, suppose it's not a monster out of Damian III or whatever, fine, maybe it's just a lost personality who's so afraid to die it lives parasitically on any nervous system it can cling to. So what? You let it into you, you're still possessed. And who do Joyce and I and your family go to for help? There's no Cree Black to help us out.' He paused and then finished deliberately: 'Cree. If there is one parapsychological phenomenon you personally should absolutely stay away from, it's possession.'
'He was right, and there was no logical rebuttal because this wasn't a logical thing. There wasn't really anything she could say. 'Ed,' she said fondly.
'What?'
'Nothing. Just Ed.'
She listened to his breathing. After a moment she heard a rustling at the other end, Edgar moving papers around on his desk, then the faint pecking that she knew was him pulling up the calendar on his digital assistant.
'Sunday,' he said resignedly. 'Couldn't possibly get there before Sunday night.'
When the phone rang at ten, she knew who it was before she snatched it off the hook. Her heart was suddenly pounding. 'Hello, you.'
Paul chuckled. 'Sorry I missed your call. I was up on the roof. Hurricane Isidore's arriving, first big blow of the year. I had to get the furniture down or it'd end up in Baton Rouge. Luckily it's more rain than wind.' His voice was warm with just a faint luster of sunny Southern vowels, and the sound of it transported her back there, to his rooftop deck where they'd drunk wine and talked and kissed. The big umbrella and teak table and chairs, the nighttime views of the French Quarter, narrow streets lined by lovely decrepit buildings and secret courtyards. The lush vegetation of New Orleans and the humid air with its sleepy, sexual charge.
'How are you?' she asked.
'Well, I was pretty good until I got your message. I had big plans for when you got here.'
'Think you can rearrange things so you can take some time in another few weeks?'
'I'll try.' His tone suggested he was put out, as he had every right to be. For a clinical psychologist with a highly successful private practice, it was not easy to carve time away.
'The situation here is a crisis, or I'd never-'
'Somebody else's crisis. Isn't that the key to surviving the psychotherapy business, Cree? Getting some distance on it? I get people in crisis every week. You learn to put up a little wall that keeps your own life intact, or else-'
'I'm not good with walls.'
He made a frustrated sound. 'Okay, a levee then. A dike. Just high enough to keep floodwaters out, right? Look, I don't want to argue about the right metaphor. I miss you. I want to see you. I've been checking the days off my calendar!'
She accepted his chastening, letting a silence give them some distance from their dissonance. 'What kind of big plans?' she asked at last.
'Frankly, very sexy plans that involved superb wine, candlelight, and good music on the stereo. As well as tickets to a couple of jazz concerts.' There was still some reproach in his voice. 'Jogging together up at the lake in the morning. Dinner at Antoine's. Then some more of the wine and candlelight thing.'
She thought of his bed in the tall room with its lazy ceiling fan; the fascinating scent of his pillows, his smell overlaid on clean linen. He had a wonderful body and a sweet physicality, and the urgency was there for both of them. But it hadn't been easy, either the first time she'd returned or her second visit in midsummer. She'd felt so inexperienced, so confused by her memories of Mike's body and the lovemaking they'd shared so long ago-a sense of betrayal that she had to fight off. And Paul had been a man in disarray after his shocking experience in Lafayette Cemetery; she suspected part of him feared her, as the agent of his shattering transformation-maybe something of what she felt around Mason Ambrose.
And still it had been sweet. Enough to make her ache, thinking about him now.
'That sounds splendid,' she said shyly. 'I had the same general plan.'
He sighed. 'So it's a crisis. And it's a case that promises to be instructive?'
